Don’t Interview the Engineer

This post is advice for managers looking to hire good engineers.  If you put a lot of value in the quality of the job interview, you might be selecting for the wrong kind of candidates.

GIT: Accented Characters in Filenames

If you are using file names with non-ASCII characters in them, then Git will sometimes behave funny.  There are some commands to know about.

PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email

I have developed a utility program that is extremely useful for testing and demonstrating applications that send email.  It is called Post Hoc.   As far as your application is concerned, it is an SMTP server, but it comes with a built in user interface to let you see and inspect the email that was sent.  Without any fuss.

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UI Guideline Resources

Every good development team creates guideline for the implementation of the user interface, so that the implementation is consistent.  A consistent meaning helps users to understand more easily what is meant by a particular arrangement of UI elements.  

Don’t Fear Rewriting New Code

The last post #28 Avoid “Test Script” Fever was about simplifying an implementation that was more elaborate than it needed to be.  There was a waterfall-style project in exactly this situation, and leader responded saying “It has already been coded the other way, and if your goal is to save programmer time, rewriting will just waste more time.”   No, it won’t, and this post explains why.

#2 Good Book: Clean Code

I want to bring you attention to an excellent book about the “craft of programming”. It is called “Clean Code” by Robert C Martin. Actually this book is a collaboration of a number of authors who contributed to make a set of rules to live by when coding. I have to say that all the rules they give make a whole lot of sense, one of the best, and most sensible collections of coding rules I have seen in many years. It covers guidelines for code structure, vertical and horizontal formatting, variable naming, class structure, method structure, data structure, test driven development, and many more topics.

I strongly recommend that if you are interested in learning the most recent, well accepted principles in the programming craft, please read this book for guidance. It will help the quality of our projects tremendously.

Title: Clean Code
Author: Robert C Martin
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-235088-4